#prisoner protest

"Inmates call hunger strike," Kingston Whig-Standard. August 9, 1976. Page 15. --- Leaders of inmates in Millhaven Institution have called on all prisoners to join a one-day hunger strike on Tuesday "to protest the cruelty, brutality and wilful neglect which characterizes the Canadian Penitentiary Services".

"As far as we know at this stage, the Kingston area institutions are all going to go on a hunger strike," said Toronto lawyer David Cole. Mr. Cole is a member of the Prison Justice Day Committee, a support group for inmates.

Spokesmen for the group read a statement explaining the inmates' "peaceful collective action" in front of the Don Jail in Toronto at 10 a.m. today. They said the Aug. 10 date "is in commemoration of the death (by suicide) of Edward Nalon on the same day in 1974, and of Robert Landers on May 21, 1976". Both men died in segregation cells at Millhaven. Landers is thought to have died of natural causes, but exact details won't be available until a coroner's inquest is held next month.

Mr. Cole's statement said: "Prisoners are particularly annoyed that the recommendations of a coroner's jury, which were made at an inquest into Nalon's death in May, 1975, were not implemented by the time Landers died." The state-ment mentioned the jury's recommendation for the re-installation of panic buttons in segregation. The emergency call buttons have been inoperative for a number of years.

Some institutions, among them the B.C. penitentiary and possibly Dorchester in New Brunswick, have indicated they would hold a work stoppage as well as a hunger strike tomorrow, according to Mr. Cole. "Millhaven inmates have not asked for a work-stoppage," he said. "Many of the inmates who were the alleged leaders of a strike at Millhaven last August were locked up 23 hours a day until June of this year."

Mr. Cole's statement added: "The deaths of Nalon and Landers are but two of many in segregation and in the general prison population. According to the government's own figures, 42 inmates have committed suicide in Canadian penitentiaries since 1970. This figure is some 13 times higher than the national average, yet the government has… resisted numerous recommendations either to render the system tolerable, or to abolish it altogether.

Millhaven director John Dowsett said he had no plans to change prison routine.

“Convicts Celebrated May Day With Songs,” Kingston Whig-Standard. May 2, 1933. Page 3. ---- Could Be Heard Very Distinctly by Those Outside the Walls ---- Hooting, shouting and singing popular songs with a gusto that made their voices clearly heard by passersby on the road, convicts of the Kingston Penitentiary, quartered in the new female prison, had their little private May Day celebration last night. Till after nine o'clock the convicts demonstrated their vocal propensities.

"We Want Nickle!” was heard more  than once by persons passing the prison. This referred to the counsel for several of the convicts charged with rioting, who was successful in having the only convict, whose trial is concluded, acquitted on the charge.

Around nine o'clock when it could be noticed that the convicts were getting tired of their own noise, strains which sounded very much like "Try A Little Tenderness" drifted out to those who were listening from the Prison Road and other popular songs were sung. A little later the convicts decided to sleep and called it a day.

"WHITE MICE CARRIED CONVICT'S MESSAGES," Daily British Whig (Kingston, Ontario). October 21, 1920. Page 2. --- Penitentiary Inmates Have a Complete System of Telegraphy. ---- In view of the combined efforts of the convicts at the penitentiary to create a disturbance by yelling and hooting in the cells, citizens have been wondering how they carried out a system to bring it all about.

It is claimed that the convicts in the "pen" have a complete system of tapping or telegraphy, by which they communicate with each other, and it is carried on with great success, in spite of the efforts of the prison authorities to put a stop to it. Sometimes the tapping is carried out on the walls, or their tin drinking cups, but it is known for a fact that convicts have communicated with each other in this way, and that many a scheme has been carried out as a result.

“Defiant Convict Perches Atop 100-Foot Tower,” Atlanta Constitution. July 24, 1940. Page 01. --- Federal Pen Preferred to Prison Camp --- Was To Have Left U.S. Cell Today, Armed With Hammer ---- Armed with a machinist’s hammer, a 20-year-old convict yesterday afternoon took refuge on a precarious perch atop the Atlanta federal penitentiary’s 100-foot-high water tower, and continued to defy all efforts to dislodge him early this morning.

While prison floodlights brilliantly illuminated the strange drama, the youthful prisoner banged on the tank with the heavy hammer, and waved to hundreds of persons gathered in the streets below. During the day and night, thousands of persons saw the man on the tower.

Identified by Warden J. W. Sanford as Andrew Jackson Wynne, of Savannah, the prisoner showed little effects of his long vigil early this morning and continued performing for the spectators.

Defies Guards Clad in the gray denim trousers of the ‘Big House,’ he defied all pleas of guards that he come down, remaining high on his perch through the night and into today, when he was to have been a free man again.

His reluctance to accept freedom, however, was explained by prison officials, who said that there is a detainer against him from the Chatham county prison camp, from which he escaped September 25, 1937.

Red-Hot Poker. His Chatham sentence - four to five years - followed the burglary of an Episcopal minister’s apartment, when he threatened to burn the minister’s feet with a red-hot poker after the clergyman refused to give him money.

He was arrested by federal authorities in Virginia for violation of the motor vehicle theft law in 1938 and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary here. He began serving his sentence November 2, 1938.

Since 1:30 Yesterday According to the warden, Wynne climbed the ladder to the top of the water tower at about 1:30 o'clock yesterday afternoon. Wynne promptly took off his shirt and made himself at home high in the air, apparently unmindful of the torrid rays of the mid-July sun.

Presence of the prisoner on the unusual lodging place aroused excitement in the neighborhood of the prison. Wynne was plainly visible from McDonnough boulevard. Several persons trained field glasses upon him. Now and then Wynne yelled and waved his shirt at onlookers.

He appeared to be sunburned, but Warden Sanford said he had been on the work shift recently, and that for this reason Wynne was used to the sun and apparently undisturbed by the blistering heat.

Causes Trafic Jam. As Wynne sat down on the tower, a traffic jam occurred around the prison as cars halted and their drivers and passengers craned necks to look at the convict during the home-going rush hours.

Asked what he intended to do about Wynne, Warden Sanford said:

‘He’s got a heavy hammer and I don’t think it good judgement risking the lives of guards in attempting to dislodge him. Wynne knows he will have to finish his prison camp sentence and took this method of making it known that he’d rather stay in the prison here than leave it.’

“Except in unusual cases, inmates must expect that the return to control by authorities will mean, at least in the short run, a return to much worse conditions of life than before the rebellion: a lockdown, angry guards, less freedom, damaged facilities, lost and destroyed personal property, and possible administrative or criminal prosecutions and penalties. Whether there are long-term improvements is another matter. A riot can be said to have failed if these penalties are severe and benefits are few, and to have succeeded if penalties are mild and benefits are great. (Of course, "success" means something quite different to those inmates for whom a riot is primarily an opportunity for retribution, predation, or recreation.) In the riots under study, the legal penalties (as opposed to the casualties of the riot and its termination) were mildest at Attica and at New Mexico.

In both cases, riot prosecutions mostly collapsed. In part, this was a product of the intensity of the riots. Evidence was destroyed in the course of the riots and recaptures; the state did not have the resources or competence to collect it all, and at Attica the crimes committed by the forces of the state irretrievably contaminated the prosecutions. Moreover, public attention was focused on the cases, particularly on the Attica defendants, and legal talent was attracted. There may also have been less willingness by inmate witnesses to cooperate with the state in New Mexico than in Michigan, after the lesson in what can happen to "snitches." It is easier to get the goods on publicly identified leaders of more orderly riots, such as that at Moundsville. It is tempting to suppose that riots will be most successful when inmates are well organized, resourceful, rational, in control of themselves and, because of these attributes, can force officials to agree to their demands. This would follow logically from the resource mobilization perspective, which emphasizes the importance of resources and skill for both the initiation and success of collective action. However, it does not follow that the greater an adversary's skill, resources, capacity for rational thought, the stronger its bargaining position. It is the paradox of the bargaining situation, as Schelling has pointed out, that the very lack of rationality and organization can give a party power to compel concessions. The weak can credibly threaten, "Improve our conditions, or we will injure ourselves, our surroundings, and our blood will be on your hands." Groups more in control of themselves, less disposed to "irrational" self-injury, do not pose the same threat. Prison officials fear most of all another New Mexico-type bloodbath. The officials in West Virginia, with "better organized," more "rational" inmates, had less to fear. Officials will do a lot to avoid a New Mexico; they are less inclined to respond deeply to a West Virginia. Thus, we should not expect a one-to-one correspondence between a riot type and riot success. While the riots at Attica and New Mexico did effect profound changes, these same riots, in more conservative or leaner times or states, may have unleashed a backlash of anti-inmate sentiment. It seems unlikely that the West Virginia riot would have brought about deeper changes had there been more New Mexico- or Attica-style killings.

On the other hand, there is some (unmeasurable) chance that additional death and destruction would have created a consciousness of emergency in the court system or even in federal agencies, resulting in the allocation of more funds to the West Virginia system. Another factor may be as simple as the belief by the public and officials that riot organizers and hostage-takers should be punished, not rewarded, for their actions. If identifiable, rational inmates negotiate a riot settlement without getting themselves killed, then prison improvements may be seen as impermissibly rewarding their riot, even legitimating it. But if the rioters are "punished" enough, as at Attica, in the course of the recapture, then perhaps the state can move on to deal with the prison's problems. Or, if the rioters are seen as a faceless, irrational mass, as at New Mexico, it is mentally easier to see prison improvements as "solving a problem" rather than caving into inmate demands. From a different perspective, "effectiveness" can be thought to involve not only concrete concessions (e.g., better prison conditions), but how the activity transforms the participants themselves and those who model their behavior after the participants. Even if one agrees that the most successful riots are the least organized, one can still suspect that a "success" like New Mexico teaches no useful lessons. The notion is that this sort of violence and disorder are debasing to the individual and the (inmate) collectivity.” - Bert Useem and Peter Kimball, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots, 1971-1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. pp. 223-225.

'Political" Prisoners By the late 1960s, it was clear that the image of the solitary inmate in rote compliance with the requirements of the prison regime was being replaced by the formation of political allegiances, initially marshalled along racial ethnic lines. The spectre of the penitentiary as a fertile ground for organized protest had placed the prison "at the center of radical politics" (Jacobs, 1976:480) and "in the forefront of the revolutionary movement in America" (Pallas and Barber, 1972:16). Of course the notion of deviance as "political' was not foreign to the sociological lexicon - - recall, for example, Merton's discussion of 'non-conformity' (1957:131-160) and Horowitz and Liebowitz's interpretation of social deviance as 'political marginality' (1967:280-296). Nevertheless, the claims of black convicts that they were 'political prisoners' (i.e., innocent victims of a corrupt society) - - were regarded by most 'liberal' analysts as emotion-laden metaphors signalling the narrower effects of racial discrimination. The idea that 'common criminals' were 'political prisoners' defied common-sense perception and was particularly hard to accept given that the latter category was traditionally reserved for those who had committed decidedly political acts (e.g., sedition, treason, desertion),or whose actions seemed unarguably altruistic. This conventional view was shaken, however, by remarks such as those made by Andrew Young, the Carter Administration's ambassador to the United Nations:

[in the U.S.], we still have hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons. Maybe even thousands, depending on how you categorize them (Sobel, 1978:25).

Young's statement, which resulted in an official reprimand, echoed both the strident accusations of black prisoners appearing in the popular media (e.g., Browning, 1972; Pell, 1972) and the more dispassionate pronouncements of social scientists, who now saw imprisonment trends in unmistakably political terms. Thus, Erik Olin Wright concluded that all prisoners are 'political prisoners' because:

The particular forms that punishment takes and the severity of punishment accorded specific offenses is a matter of political policy and varies considerably among political systems .... punishment, as a deterrent to crime, is an essential tool of social control by the political system (1973:24).

Such sociologically couched abstractions acquired a specific gravity in the blunt summations of front-line resisters: 

Sisters and brothers axe becoming cognizant of the fact that jails and prisons are concentration camps for the poor (Davis, 1971:25).

Prisons should be viewed as no more than the ruling class's last line of defense against the industrial reserve army (Huston, 1973:32).

These perceptions were reinforced by the disproportionate imprisonment of black males in the U.S. (Christianson, 1981), by official atrocities in response to protest incidents as at Attica (Martinson, 1972), and by political trials such as the Chicago Seven and the San Quentin Six (Wald, 1976), all of which  underscored the repressive character of American prisons and further exposedthe conflictual nature of 'crime'.

While much of this ferment took place in U.S. prisons, the aura of dissent permeated Canadian institutions as well, peaking in 1975-76 with major incidents involving hostage-takings and other violent disturbances, and prompting an emergency inquiry into the Canadian penitentiary system (MacGuigan, 1977). In the less turbulent setting of Canadian society, most Canadian penologists tended to regard these prison disturbances as stemming from 'managerial' problems with difficult inmates (Desroches, 1974), as the consequence of inept prison administration (Douglas et al., 1980), as a function of the tense prison 'atmosphere' (Jayewardene and Jayasuriya, 1981) or of the constraints of the 'inmate code' (Lowman, 1986), or as an outcome of contradictions between the control and rehabilitative functions of prisons (MacLean, 1983). Some rudimentary political interpretations were formulated (Culhane, 1985), with Gosselin's indictment of the Canadian prison system finding strong resonances with the political critiques circulated by the American Black Power movement:

...the struggle against the penitentiar yis above all the struggle against the social system that creates such an institution. Viewed from that perspective, all prisoners are political prisoners (1982:176)

- Johnson, R. and Dorin, D.D., 'Dysfunctional ideology: the black revolutionary in prison', in Szabo, D. and Katzenelson, S. (eds), Offenders and Corrections (New York: Praeger, 1978), p. 45